Auction Insights

Auction Insights does not show you your competitors' bids, budgets or keywords. What it shows is relative behaviour: how often your ads and a rival's ads appeared in the same auctions, who showed more often, and who tended to win the higher position. You can pull the report at account, campaign, ad group or keyword level, and you can segment it by time, device and day to spot patterns that a single snapshot hides.

The report lists each competing domain as a row with six core columns. Impression share is the percentage of auctions you entered that you actually showed in. Overlap rate is how often a competitor appeared when you did. Position above rate is how often that competitor ranked higher than you when you both showed. Top-of-page rate and absolute top-of-page rate tell you how often ads appeared above the organic results or in the very first slot. Outranking share combines all of this into how often you ranked above a given competitor or showed when they did not.

Google aggregates anonymised auction data from advertisers that overlapped with you on the same searches over the period you select. To see a competitor in your report, both of you must have had enough auction activity to clear Google's privacy threshold, so very small accounts or niche keywords sometimes return sparse rows. You read it by spotting domains with high overlap and high position above rate: those are the rivals actively pushing you down in the rankings.

Auction Insights turns a vague sense of competition into numbers you can act on. A sudden drop in your impression share next to a new domain with a high position above rate usually means a competitor entered the market or raised bids, which lets you respond with budget, bids or sharper ad copy before performance slides. It also helps you decide where brand defence, more aggressive bidding or simply a better landing page will move the needle most.